Narrative Features of Early Modern Narrative (United Kingdom) (11/30/12; Narrative 6/27/13-6/29/13)

full name / name of organization:

Monika Fludernik and Gerd Bayer

contact email:

gdbayer@phil.uni-erlangen.de and sekretariat.fludernik@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

Abstracts are invited for a seminar to be proposed to the 2013 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, 27-29 June 2013 in Manchester, England.

Narrative Features of Early Modern Narrative

The early modern age was marked by major cultural changes, religious schism, and technological innovations. Momentous developments such as the spread of printing and the growing importance writers paid to their own state of mind and selfhood left their traces on the narrative features of various forms of early modern discourse. Allowing for a wide range of generic traditions, such as prose fiction, autobiography, diary, confession, or the essay, this seminar will ask both for the state of narrative in the early modern age and for areas of innovation and change that marked the period’s approach to narrative.

Papers in this seminar could, for instance, ask:
• how narratives position themselves between realism and imagination, between factual and fictional forms of representation
• what specific narrative techniques early modern narratives employ and for what purposes
• how authors of early modern narratives fashion themselves vis-à-vis their narrators
• how narratives endow their characters with a sense of selfhood
• how narrative texts draw from theological, philosophical and political discourses
• what kind of culturally defined narratees and readers early modern narratives inscribe
• how narrative features travel across cultural and linguistic borders
• how narrative features impact the process of generic development
• what role lyrical and dramatic genres play in the refashioning of early modern narrative features.